- Amazon said this week it was building a new headquarters for the company's Project Kuiper satellite initiative somewhere in Redmond, Washington, but did not reveal the location.
- Sources told Business Insider it's a two-building campus just a few miles from Microsoft's headquarters called the Redmond Commerce Center.
- Project Kuiper is the Seattle-based company's effort to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband internet by launching more than 3,200 satellites into orbit.
- Amazon has yet to confirm the location of the facility but said it would serve as the headquarters for research and development and "prototype manufacturing and qualification facility."
- We went to the site to check it out and took a few photos.
- Click here to read more BI Prime stories.
Amazon has kept mum about the specific location of the headquarters for its initiative to fling thousands of satellites into space, but sources told Business Insider that the home base for Amazon's Project Kuiper is a two-building campus just a few miles from Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters and SpaceX's Redmond facility.
Project Kuiper is Amazon's effort to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband internet by launching more than 3,200 satellites into low earth orbit.
Amazon on Wednesday said it has leased a two-building 219,000-square-foot campus in Redmond to serve as the headquarters for research and development and "prototype manufacturing and qualification facility" for Project Kuiper. But it provided no further information.
The location of the campus will be the Redmond Commerce Center, according to two sources familiar with the situation who offered the information independently. Amazon recently leased the entirety of the center, which was formerly occupied by a construction-tool manufacturer called Genie Industries, the sources said.
Here's a look at some of the buildings, which Business Insider visited on Thursday:
Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request to confirm the location. The company said in Wednesday's announcement that renovations on the facilities were already underway and the Project Kuiper team would move into the new headquarters next year.
The company appears to have big plans for Project Kuiper, according to the 165 job advertisements for the initiative posted on its website at the time of this writing. The company may be planning to hire more than one employee per position. It's unclear how many Amazon employees are working on the initiative now, but 84 users on LinkedIn list the term "Project Kuiper" in their job titles.
The Project Kuiper headquarters, Amazon said, will include offices and design space, research and development labs, and prototype-manufacturing facilities.
The satellites are meant to provide high-speed internet connectivity to populations in remote and rural areas that traditional satellites don't serve. Amazon isn't alone in this endeavor. SpaceX is planning to launch as many as 42,000 of its Starlink satellites over the next decade, according to government filings, and has already launched 120.
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